How To Grow A Cottage Garden
Cottage gardens are traditionally thought of as English gardens, lushly planted with colorful jumbles of flowers and shrubs, and grown in areas with mild winters and cool summers. Unfortunately, most places in the U.S. outside of the Pacific Northwest do not have the proper climate for an English garden.
Luckily, American cottage gardens are just as beautiful and better adapted to our climate. Still based on the lovely informal array of flowers and shrubs, they are perfectly suited to most informal suburban homes or country lots without the need for a huge English manor garden space that few of us have.
American cottage gardening encompasses using more drought tolerant and native plants, plants that are hardier for cold winter climates, and plants that tolerate and even thrive on the sunshine. The style tends to look natural and free flowing without any plan or design, however does indeed usually have a backbone plan to bring out the best in plant color combinations and textures that compliment each other. That being said, cottage gardens are also places where self seeded plants may be allowed to pop up as they will, and the garden is always a surprise from one season to the next! Flowers, shrubs, vegetables and herbs may share the same beds, and roses abound! Vines soften fences and walls, and furniture and decor is simple and comfortable.
Some easy to grow, drought and heat resistant plants perfect for the American cottage garden include yarrow, valerian, Russian sage, coneflower, coreopsis, scabiosa, joe pye weed, daffodils, sunflower, butterfly bush and roses. Many herbs also love heat. Sage, thyme, purple basil, golden oregano and lavender all thrive in my high desert garden. Annuals can be seeded directly in the garden and many self sow for next year as well. Good cottage gardens choices include cosmos, annual sunflower, cleome, alyssum and poppies.
Cottage gardens are magical places, full of charm, whimsy and surprises, and a perfect place to let your creativity in the garden shine and grow. Don’t forget to add a meandering path, a rustic or painted arbor, and a picket fence here or there.
My own garden here at The Garden Glove is a cottage garden style, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. See photos and read articles on cottage style gardens at TheGardenGlove.com/cottage_garden.html.
If you’re looking for a laid back style, beautiful easy care flowers, and a charming feel for your home and garden, cottage style is for you.
Kathy Wilson
http://www.articlesbase.com/gardening-articles/how-to-grow-a-cottage-garden-135996.html
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Please tell me what to grow in an authentic English cottage garden?
Greetings from the USA:)
Over here,we use the word garden to mean flower beds,not a yard.
Roses, marigolds
There is a website here http://www.englishplants.co.uk/cottage.html that tells you which plants are typical of this type of garden. Good luck!
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roses, elderflower, daffodils, bluebells, primroses
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Write to me i live in england and i will go into the fields and send you some wild flower seeds
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weeeed
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Why don’t you go try fuckinga rose
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Traditional country flowers would be appropriate – roses (of course), hollyhocks, snapdragons (antirrhinum), lupins, bluebells, honeysuckle, pansies, crocuses, daffodils, hyacinths, heather, lavender, anemones, peonies, snowdrops, etc. Plus some flowering shrubs, and maybe some wild flowers like willowherb, dog rose, brambles and scarlet pimpernel. (Careful not to let the wild ones take over, though.) Layout shouldn’t be at all formal – flowers all mixed together in a cheerful profusion..
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Roses, lavender and honeysuckle.
And a cricket square, if you can fit it in…
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You need to grow perennial plants i.e. those that come up every year. I have an cottage garden and I grow, marigolds, valerian, bluebells, primroses, roses, forget-me-knots, antiryhnems, violets, polyanthus, all the bulbs such as daffodil and tulip, dephiniums, hollyhocks, pansies, peonnies, scabius, flocks and stocks, digitalis,, to name but a few. Happy gardening. PS I am in Southern England.
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Greetings back from the UK! There is a famous poem – it follows.
I can send you some seeds but your customs people get really annoyed and will often send them back. Unfortunately, I can’t send the insects or birds and I can’t sing this to you. (Some people sing like the mentioned ‘Nightingales – I sing like a Night In Jail!)
How many gentle flowers grow
In an English country garden
I’ll tell you now of some I know
And those I’ll miss I hope you’ll pardon
Daffodils, heart’s ease and flox
Meadowsweet and lily stalks
Gentain, lupine and tall hollihocks
Roses, foxgloves, snowdrops, forget-me-nots
In an English country garden
How many insects find their home
In an English country garden
I’ll tell you now of some I know
Those I miss I hope you’ll pardon
Dragonflies, moths and bees
Spiders falling from the trees
Butterflies sway in the mild gentle breeze
There are hedgehogs that roam
And little gnomes
In an English country garden
How many songbirds make their nests
In an English country garden
I’ll tell you now of some I know
Those I miss I hope you’ll pardon
Bobolink, coo-cooing doves
Robins and the whirlwind thrush
Bluebird, lark, pigeon, nightingale
We all smile in the spring
When the birds all start to sing
In an English country garden
And there isn’t a single garden in England with all this in!
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I am not English but I am a horticulturist and garden consultant. One thing I would like to point out for you is that it is not necessarily the flower choices that define an English cottage garden as much as the style or design. The key thought here is chaos within control. You would ideally create beds bordered by hedges, walls or other barriers, choose a few well placed ornaments like an urn or a fountain and then plant flowers that reseed about and allow them to come up randomly. You would of course ‘edit’ here and there but the whole idea is certain amount of abandon. Consider dianthus, rose campion, hollyhocks, foxglove, larkspur and asters.
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I wouldn’t grow flowers, I would grow herbs. There is no substitute for fresh herbs in cooking.
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